National Parks in Prospect

National Parks are celebrated as “America’s best idea” and visited by tens of millions each year. Although the National Park Service (NPS) is often thought of as a straightforward preservation agency, it is also a cultural institution that has fundamentally shaped the relationship between national identity, memory, and land in the United States. The NPS interprets history through the curation of over four hundred cultural landscapes replete with architecture and vast collections of Indigenous artifacts, objects of fine art and material culture, and memorials and museums. Representations of National Parks also play a critical role in shaping ideas about nature and national belonging. Indeed, the past and present of National Parks have been grounded in, mediated by, and circulated through visual phenomena such as landscape paintings, nature photography, tourist brochures, and contemporary art. Despite these representations’ significance, much of the existing art historical scholarship focuses on the late nineteenth century, when the first National Parks were created through a settler colonial process that both relied on, and reinforced, an emergent visual ideology of landscape that paved the way for the dispossession of Native Americans in the name of preserving “public lands.” The introduction to this special issue, “National Parks in Prospect,” historically situates contributions—in the form of original essays, interviews, and artists portfolios—by American studies scholars, art and architectural historians, artists, curators, and National Park professionals, to analyze the role of art and visual culture in relation to National Parks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.